Agriculture & agribusiness
with the details that matter.
Grain handling, dairy and food processing, silos, and equipment buildings. We pair the capture method to the way your team will use the result.
What needs to be
measured first?
Grain handling, dairy, and food processing facilities carry the same problems as any process plant plus seasonality, so capture is scheduled around harvest and production cycles. Silos, conveyor galleries, and storage structures also benefit from aerial capture for condition and volume work.
Every facility has a different risk surface. We start with access, geometry density, and the decision the capture needs to unlock — then choose between laser scanning, drone mapping, or both.
Talk through a scope- Grain handling
- Silos and elevators
- Dairy and processing
- Cold storage
- Equipment buildings
- Site and stockpiles
Capturing grain, dairy, and processing facilities
Agricultural facilities carry every problem a process plant has, plus a season. The capture order works outward from the handling path, because that is what most projects modify, and it deliberately treats bin and silo interiors as a separate conversation.
Receiving and the handling path
Truck and rail receiving, dump pits, scales, and the route material takes from delivery to storage. Throughput upgrades start here, and the geometry that limits them is usually the pit and the first conveyor rather than the storage itself.
Legs, headhouse, and galleries
Bucket elevator legs, distributors, the headhouse structure, and conveyor galleries between structures. This is congested steel at height and it is where a capacity project spends most of its money, so it earns the densest setups.
Bins, silos, and storage exteriors
Shell geometry, roof and eave detail, hoppers, support structure, and the spacing between structures. Aerial capture covers roofs and tops without anyone climbing, and terrestrial setups handle the shells and the connections at grade.
Processing and packaging rooms
Dairy parlours, milk rooms, processing halls, packing lines, and cold storage, where washdown finishes, drains, and hygienic construction all shape what the survey has to record and how it has to be planned.
Yard, stockpiles, and site
Access roads, truck circulation, outdoor storage, drying and aeration equipment, and any stockpiled material where a volume is wanted. This is aerial work, and volume calculations need a defined base surface as much as they need a surface over the top.
Harvest, dust, and biosecurity
Seasonality decides everything. A grain facility during harvest has no interest in a survey crew and no spare hours to escort one, so the practical windows are the quiet months between seasons. Dust is a real hazard rather than a nuisance in grain handling: ignition sources are controlled, equipment brought into handling areas is subject to the site's rules, and accumulated dust on every surface also degrades what an optical instrument returns.
Livestock and dairy operations add biosecurity requirements that govern movement between sites, footwear and clothing, equipment disinfection, and sometimes a waiting period between visiting one farm and another. These rules exist to protect the herd and they are followed literally. Processing plants add washdown schedules to the mix, which is genuinely useful: the gap after a sanitation cycle and before the next production run is often the cleanest, quietest, and most productive time to capture a processing hall.
More on how this works in practice is on our guide to scanning without a shutdown.
Deliverables for handling and storage projects
Most agricultural projects are either a capacity question or a structural one, and the two want quite different things from a capture.
| The decision | What to ask for | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Conveyor, leg, or handling upgrade | Point cloud plus modeled structure and equipment | New equipment has to thread through existing steel, and threading is a clash problem needing solids. |
| Bin, silo, or structure documentation | Registered cloud with measured elevations and sections | Shell geometry, support structure, and connections feed a structural assessment your engineer performs. |
| Stockpile or material volumes | Aerial surface model with volume reporting | The number is only as good as the base surface assumption, which is why the method gets stated with the result. |
| Processing plant expansion | Existing conditions drawings plus a model where scoped | Hygienic layouts and utility routing need the same coordinated treatment as any other process building. |
Formats and what each one is good for are covered on the deliverables page.
What gets missed on agricultural sites
- Dust on every surface — A coating of fine dust scatters and attenuates the returned signal, and in a grain facility every surface has one. Capture quality is noticeably better after a cleaning cycle, and where that is impossible the setup plan has to compensate with shorter ranges and better angles.
- Assuming bin interiors are accessible — Entering a bin or silo is confined space work with an engulfment hazard, and the decision to enter is rarely justified by a survey alone. Most interior questions are better answered when a structure is already open for inspection or maintenance, planned under the site's own entry procedure.
- Volumes without a base surface — A stockpile volume is the difference between the captured surface and an assumed base, and the assumption dominates the error. Capturing the pad when it is empty, or agreeing the base method explicitly, is what makes the number defensible.
- Scanning in the wrong season — A facility captured mid-harvest is full, busy, and partly inaccessible, and a facility captured mid-winter may have equipment dismantled for maintenance. Neither is wrong, but the state of the site at capture has to match the question the project is asking.
What agribusiness operators ask
When is the best time to capture a grain facility?
Outside the receiving season, when staff have time to escort, equipment is idle, and the site is at its cleanest. Capture during harvest is possible but slower and more restricted, and the data is worse because dust and material in motion both interfere with what the instrument sees.
Can you scan inside a bin or silo?
Only where your own confined space procedure permits it and there is a genuine reason to enter, because the hazards inside a storage structure are severe. In practice, interior capture is scheduled alongside a planned inspection or maintenance entry that was happening anyway, under your permit and your attendant, rather than arranged for the survey's convenience.
Can you measure stockpile volumes?
Yes, from an aerial capture, and the honest part of the answer is that the base surface matters as much as the top one. A pile sitting on a pad captured while empty gives a much more defensible number than one calculated against an assumed plane, so the method gets stated alongside the result.
Do you work on dairy and livestock sites?
Yes, working to the site's biosecurity requirements — clothing, footwear, equipment disinfection, and any interval required between farms. Parlours, milk rooms, and processing areas capture much like any other washdown environment, with reflective stainless and wet floors as the main technical constraint.
Pair TLS interiors with drone exteriors for one coordinate story.
Roof, yard, tanks, structures, and the building envelope can live in the same project handoff when the control is planned upfront.
See existing conditionsMake the invisible
measurable.
Tell us what is inside, outside, and on the line. We will help you scope the capture and the handoff — in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut.
Request a scan quote